You need to hear this.

Facebook crashes thanks to server configuration issue

Yesterday, a lot of people found themselves wondering the same question: What do I do now that Facebook isn’t working, and how will I find out what people I haven't seen for 10 years are up to? At around 11:00 EDT, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all affected in one way or another, causing many people to alter their internet-dependent lifestyles.

According to The Verge:

“For some, the services were completely inaccessible. For others, certain features like stories or direct messaging stopped working. It was a stark reminder that three of the world’s most popular internet services are owned and operated by a single giant corporation. It wasn’t until over 24 hours later that Facebook finally gave the all clear, attributing the downtime to a 'server configuration change.'”

The number of people freaking out yesterday over the outage goes to show how the internet has come to shape our world and how we live. It’s crazy how one company going down would have so much impact, and one tiny configuration error could affect many millions or even billions of lives.

Cryptocurrency crimes: OneCoin founders arrested

When you’re little, they always ask what you want to be when you grow up. For most, it’s a firefighter or a doctor. Apparently, for Konstantin Ignatov and his sister Ruja Ignatova, their ideal career was running a cryptocurrency scam called OneCoin. And while that might have worked out for them for a while, they were both recently arrested by U.S. law enforcement for selling OneCoin packages and not actually delivering on their product ... A.K.A. fraud.

According to Engadget the brother and sister team “allegedly orchestrated a 'multibillion-dollar pyramid scheme' where people received commissions for persuading people to buy OneCoin packages that themselves were junk. OneCoin reportedly rigged prices, sold people non-existent coins and didn't even have a true blockchain to manage the currency ...

"While the cryptocurrency was ultimately a front, the arrest illustrates the ongoing challenges of policing virtual money. The technology is still young, and officials still aren't sure how to regulate it - crooks might thrive simply due to a lack of scrutiny. High-profile busts like could help discourage future crypto scams, or at least limit the potential damage."

The duo made more than 2 billion dollars in just a few years, and now they face up to 20 years in prison. This is an interesting case to watch, as it will shape how law enforcement deals with cryptocurrency scams.

But there's more going on in the world than that.

Promising lithium battery performance enhancements

Rechargeable lithium metal batteries are everywhere. They’re in our cameras, cars, and in our phones. There are literally billions of them out there in the world. However, one thing that’s keeping them from peak performance is the stability of its solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI), a salt layer on the surface of the battery. That’s why chemists are making improvements in an effort to solve the issue.

According to Science Daily:

“Led by chemistry doctoral student Yue Gao, the enhanced SEI is a reactive polymer composite consisting of polymeric lithium salt, lithium fluoride nanoparticles, and graphene oxide sheets. The novel construction of this battery component has thin layers of these materials ... 'With a more stable SEI, it's possible to double the energy density of current batteries, while making them last longer and be safer,' Wang said."

Using the new process, battery manufacturers will also be able to decrease weight and lower manufacturing costs. So while this may be a small step for batteries, the implications might lead to a giant (at least bigger) leap for electronic-and-even-human kind.

And you can't not know this.

Google breaks record on Pi Day

Happy Pi Day, folks! If you didn't know already, Mar. 14 translates to 3-14 like the first three digits of Pi. Therefore, today is one of the most special days of the year for number lovers and confection cravers alike. This year’s Pi Day is especially awesome because Google did something super geeky. With their massive cloud computing power, they broke the record for calculating digits of Pi. And like the overachievers they are, they made it to 31.4 trillion digits. Yes. TRILLION.

According to Forbes:

"The work was done by Google employee Emma Haruka Iwao who used Google Cloud and the company's Compute Engine to calculate Pi to 31,415,926,535,897 digits. Cloud services are a pretty good place to perform calculations like this because they can make use of multiple machines and massive shared storage. That's important because it took 170 terabytes of data to complete the task, which Google says is about the same amount of information as is stored in the Library of Congress. Because all this data is stored in the cloud Google is also letting people download the computed sequence as a disk image for them to use as they please.”

The entire calculations took 121 days for 25 virtual machines working together to complete. Hopefully, everyone at Google got to celebrate with a slice of real pie. Even if they didn’t, I hope you all are getting your own slice.

This person is a verified professional.

Everyone I work with was acting like it was the apocalypse yesterday. I got blamed a few times, as they thought that IT was blocking access to social media. Who knew that you actually had to work at work???

This person is a verified professional.

A "server configuration change" took down half the Internet AND you made the change without testing AND you didn't have a way to quickly roll back. Really? Sorry. I'm calling BS on this one. FB are leaving out some MAJOR details. Whatever really happened is far more embarrassing than a server config snafu...which is already pretty embarrassing.

OneCoin fraud arrests

Prediction: using their $2 billion, the Ignatova siblings will be able to hire the best lawyers. They'll avoid jail time but they'll have to give their lawyers around $2 billion while the victims of the crime will each receive a $1.25 settlement check.

Lithium battery improvements

Graphene is a miracle substance. Do yourself a favor and Google it.

Google's 3.14 trillion digits of Pi

If you cut a pie in to 3.14 trillion pieces...ah, nevermind. Yay math!

This person is a verified professional.

Whenever I hear of someone setting a new record in computing Pi or remembering digits of Pi, I get frustrated at the waste of resources. What good is it to anyone to have calculated Pi to it over 3 Trillion places? How is it useful for anyone to memorise Pi to more than a couple of decimal places?

This person is a verified professional.

Facebook - apparently our police had to advise people to stop calling 000 (our 911) due to the "Facebook Outage"...apparently people here are daft enough to think it's an emergency...sigh...I didn't know until I got to work. (no, no-one harassed IT for this, LOL)

This person is a verified professional.

Whenever I hear of someone setting a new record in computing Pi or remembering digits of Pi, I get frustrated at the waste of resources. What good is it to anyone to have calculated Pi to it over 3 Trillion places? How is it useful for anyone to memorise Pi to more than a couple of decimal places?

This person is a verified professional.

Whenever I hear of someone setting a new record in computing Pi or remembering digits of Pi, I get frustrated at the waste of resources. What good is it to anyone to have calculated Pi to it over 3 Trillion places? How is it useful for anyone to memorise Pi to more than a couple of decimal places?